This article will assume you know at least something about HTML, and a bit about CSS – even if it is just the basic stuff like the simple code shown in the example in part 3:
<html>
<head>
<title>My First Home Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Welcome to my home page!</p>
<p>Check out my other pages:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="about.html">About Me</a></li>
<li><a href="mydog.html">My Dog</a></li>
<li><a href="poetry.html">My Poems</a></li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
That makes this:
My First Home Page
But, with a bit of additional CSS styles, we can colorize and do other effects.
<html>
<head>
<title>My First Home Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p style="color: red">Welcome to my home page!</p>
<p style="color: green">Check out my other pages:</p>
<ul style="background: black">
<li><a href="about.html">About Me</a></li>
<li><a href="mydog.html">My Dog</a></li>
<li><a href="poetry.html">My Poems</a></li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
That might look like this:
My First Home Page … in COLOR!
Here is an excellent tutorial on CSS:
http://www.w3schools.com/css/
I was visiting this site a few weeks ago looking up some CSS things and I ran across a style sheet they had created which let you easily create navigation bars, menus, and responsive (scales to phone or desktop screens) websites. It was called w3.css:
http://www.w3schools.com/w3css/
By linking in that style sheet, and tagging items in your web page, you can turn a boring, bland HTML page in to something more modern. By just including the “w3.css” style sheet in your page, and adding a “class” parameter to an unordered list, you suddenly have a modern navigation menubar:
<html>
<head>
<title>My First Home Page</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.w3schools.com/lib/w3.css">
</head>
<body>
<ul class="w3-navbar w3-blue">
<li><a href="about.html">About Me</a></li>
<li><a href="mydog.html">My Dog</a></li>
<li><a href="poetry.html">My Poems</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Welcome to my home page!</p>
<p>Check out my other pages by using the top menu.</p>
</body>
</html>
Since I wanted the menu bar to be at the top, I moved that line to the top. It looks like this:
My First Home Page … using w3.css!
And by adding a few more “class” tags, you can create horizontal side menus and a bunch more. For example, you can easily create a page layout, such as a navigation bar, left box, and main content area:
<html>
<head>
<title>My First Home Page</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.w3schools.com/lib/w3.css">
</head>
<body>
<ul class="w3-navbar w3-blue">
<li><a href="about.html">About Me</a></li>
<li><a href="mydog.html">My Dog</a></li>
<li><a href="poetry.html">My Poems</a></li>
</ul>
<div class="w3-row"> <div class="w3-third w3-container w3-green">
<h2>Thought for the Day</h2>
</div> <div class="w3-twothird w3-container">
<h2>Welcome to my home page!</h2>
<p>Check out my other pages by using the top menu.</p>
</div> </div>
</body>
</html>
…and suddenly you have this:
My First Home Page … now with CSS!
And, this design automatically becomes responsive, and resizes for phone screens:
My First Home Page … now responsive!
How cool is that?
I just had to share.
Explore the w3.css tutorial site for many examples. There are a ton of fun things you can do with very little work these days.
Let’s set the wayback machine to 1995, when I first learned HTML.
The company where I worked had an internal web server. Many of the other engineers had their own small work-related web pages, so I wanted one too. I decided to learn HTML.
Consider this very, very simple HTML page:
<html>
<head>
<title>My First Home Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Welcome to my home page!</p>
</body>
</html>
This very simple page would present an empty screen with one short paragraph.
Perhaps we want to add a list of links to some other pages:
<html>
<head>
<title>My First Home Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Welcome to my home page!</p>
<p>Check out my other pages:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="about.html">About Me</a></li>
<li><a href="mydog.html">My Dog</a></li>
<li><a href="poetry.html">My Poems</a></li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
…and thus, the world wide web as we know it began, with endless, simple home pages.
HTML gave us many things, like bold text and italics, and even ways to make simple tables. As web browsers evolved, so did web pages, and soon designers were creating amazing sites by abusing the very simple HTML language.
And boy was it messy.
Netscape might show a web page differently than Internet Explorer, so designers had to use all kinds of tricks to try to make their sites viewable on different browsers and operating systems.
And boy was it messy.
Over the years, web developers came up with all kinds of hacks and tricks to make pages look “pretty” like they wanted, and look similar on different systems and browsers. They were using HTML in ways the language was never intended to be used.
Web browsers came and went, and the HTML standard evolved with browsers slowly becoming more standardized and able to render the same webpages similarly without (as many) hacks.
Somewhere along the line, cascading style sheets (CSS) started getting used, giving developers a proper way to instruct a browser on how to render HTML. The wikipedia page says CSS came out in 1996:
…but it was many years before software supported it enough to make it widespread. I remember going through three or four expensive versions of the Dreamweaver web authoring program before finally getting one that sorta-kinda supported CSS.
I believe CSS finally came in to its own thanks to the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. This moved the world wide web from large desktop screens to tiny screens into our pockets. Since viewing full sized websites on a tiny screen wasn’t that fun, web standards continued to evolve with new approaches to make websites look less crappy on tiny screens while still looking nice on large computer screens.
And boy was it complicated…
Up next: How to make a modern looking website without having to learn (almost anything about) CSS.
Previously, I began this article by discussing my first experience making a website back in 1995, along with mentioning a custom program I wrote to help speed up the process.
Over the years, the web has grown considerably, and the HTML “language” has evolved and added more features. (Does anyone remember the “blink” HTML tag?) It’s taken two decades, but we are finally getting to the point where web browsers are finally standardized enough that website designers don’t have to rely on all kinds of hacks and tricks just to make their sites appear similar on different systems.
In the early days, a browser called Netscape dominated. Microsoft introduced their first Internet Explorer (bringing the World Wide Web to PC users) and Apple had whatever the heck it had. Other operating systems, like IBM’s OS/2 Warp, had browsers of their own … and all rendered HTML a bit differently.
It was a mess.
Pages wouldn’t look the same when using Netscape on a PC versus Mac. Internet Explorer was even made for Macs at one point, and initially it added features that the PC version didn’t have.
It was a mess.
I know I just said that, but I feel it is worth repeating.
It was a mess.
Today, it seems pretty rare to find folks editing HTML by hand. There are endless options for HTML editors (like Dreamweaver) that aid in building websites using templates and libraries of HTML code. There are also tons of content management systems like WordPress (which this site currently uses) that let folks easily set up a site based on a pre-existing theme and customize it a bit without ever touching a line of code.
And this is why so much of the internet looks bland, boring, and similar. Folks like me pick out some very common WordPress theme and look like thousands of other sites using the same theme.
Because writing a modern-looking website is hard.
However, last week I stumbled upon something that appears to let my ancient 1995 HTML skills quickly and easily create a modern-looking website with very simple HTML code.
In the next installment, I will introduce you to the w3.css. If you have ever built HTML by hand, and are unaware of w3.css, hopefully you will be as impressed as I am by what it is capable of.
This article will discuss an amazingly easy way to create modern websites using a cool thing I just found out about.
But, like most of my articles, we begin with a long, rambling story about my history with the web…
I built my first HTML web page in 1995, I think. It was the early and crude days of the World Wide Web. I remember having my first public website (which we all called “home pages” back then) on a free service called GeoPages. This server was later renamed to GeoCities and was eventually acquired by Yahoo!
Here is the Wikipedia entry with some of the history. It’s quite interesting seeing where things began:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_GeoCities
According to a news article referenced by Wikipedia, the name change happened in December 1995. I wish I still had copies of my first home page, but space was limited back then so few of us kept earlier versions of the things we did.
At some point, I moved my home page from GeoCities to Delphi, and it stayed there for awhile before I finally archived it to my own domain. It looks like I last updated it in 2000, so here is an archive of my old site that begin in 1995:
http://alsplace.os9al.com/alsplace.html
My original home page, as it was in 1999-ish.
Those were the days! HTML 1.0!
In those days, HTML was edited by hand in a text editor. I used the umacs editor on a SunOS workstation, and later, umacs for MS-DOS on a Toshiba laptop. I wrote several programs in C to help me built more complex sites by using template files and includes. I basically created a C-style “#ifdef”, “#include” and “#define” preprocessor for HTML, and also added variables.
If I wanted a consistent header and/or footer at the top of every page, I could create a file like “TOP.TEM” (top template) with that code, and then in my page files (INDEX.TEM, ABOUT.TEM, LINKS.TEM) I would do a “#include TOP.TEM”. When I ran my preprocessor, it would parse the files and generate the actual .HTM files. (Ah, those lousy days in the PC world where file names were limited to eight letters and a three letter extension!)
For variables, I could create a “#define EMAIL alsplace@pobox.com” in a template, and then anywhere the text “%EMAIL%” appeared in the file would get replaced with “alsplace@pobox.com”. It let me make global changes to my site and rebuild in seconds.
Years later, I would purchase the expensive Macromedia Dreamweaver, which is today known as Adobe Dreamweaver. (Hmmm, why is everything I use acquired by someone else?) This industrial strength web editor finally allowed me to edit in a more visual mode rather than raw HTML coding.
But, even though it added the concept of Library items and Templates, it was (and still is!) so far slower when generating a site than my ancient 1995 preprocessor.
I am selling my 3rd generation Apple TV, in case anyone is interested. There were two revisions of this model made, and mine is the second revision. It is complete with the original box and everything: https://www.ebay.com/itm/332089630970
I have a few dozen different websites, but none for a subject like this, so I’ll just post it here. Maybe you will find it interesting.
Since a big portion of this site is topics from my 8-bit computer days in the 1980s, I now find myself wondering if I remember any of the stories I tell correctly. Most of the things I think I recall, I think I recall correctly … but now I am wondering if anything I say here is accurate. Join me on a quick detour and let’s have some fun with memories…
On December 22, 2015, an e-mail newsletter I receive from DIGG had a subject that caught my attention. It said:
Your Memories Aren’t Real
The newsletter usually contains around a dozen links to articles on other sites, but the first one was titled “The Movie That Doesen’t Exist And The Redditors Who Think It Does“. The description talked about hundreds of people remembering a cheesy 1990’s movie called “Shazaam” and that no such movie exists. I initially shrugged this off because I was well aware of a movie called “Kazaam” that started the basketball player Shaquille O’Neal.
I was curious about how this could be “a thing” so I read the article. Here it is:
This article discusses something called the Mandela Effect, named after groups of people who incorrectly remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Some news or event must have happened back then that confused many people the same way.
I had previously heard references to Mandela Effect on Free Talk Live, a liberty-minded syndicated talk radio program. They occasionally brought it up, using the example of how the children’s book is Berenstain Bears and not Berenstein Bears like many recall. I always heard it as “stein” so I had repeated it incorrectly my entire life.
This led me to do some quick web searches to see if there was anything more to it than that, and I found all kinds of amusing posts and YouTube videos. Most of them are in the same league as “misheard song lyrics” and made me think of a book a former coworker friend of mine, James, had pointed me to ages ago. A quick search right now shows that there is even a website dedicated to this:
http://kissthisguy.com/
(That’s a reference to the Jimi Hendrix song, which some mishear as “Excuse me while I kiss this guy!”)
I went through various lists of movie quotes everyone seems to get wrong (“NO, I am your father!”, “Life WAS like a box of chocolates”, “MAGIC mirror on the wall”) and even TV items most of us heard hundreds of times if we grew up in the 70s (“It’s a beautiful day in THIS neighborhood”). I was stunned at how many I was wrong about.
The Mandela Effect folks say this could be a sign of parallel worlds/dimensions/etc. and folks slipping between them, noticing something is off in a product logo, or song lyric or something they swear they remember and know.
It’s quite entertaining.
One actually hit me pretty hard. When I was first getting involved with Renaissance Festivals in the late 1990s, I had some smart friends that would often explain some of the historical inaccuracies these events propagate. (No, pirates like you recognize don’t belong at a typical Renaissance festival – they are closer to the Wild West era than medieval times.) One of these items was turkey legs and how turkeys were from the New World and didn’t even exist in Europe until they were brought over at a much later time (1500s?).
So how did turkey legs become so popular? I was pointed to a painting (which I always thought was of one of the King Henrys). It showed him holding up something that looked like a turkey leg. My friend explained it was likely some other type of meat. I remember looking the picture up (a color painting) back in those dial-up internet days.
Over the years, I’ve mentioned this to other festival newbies, and you can certainly find tons of references to such a painting, as well as find the pose parodied all over the place.
But there is no such painting. At least, not of King Henry.
I am confident such a painting exists, tho for all I know it was painted in the 1960s (the first Renaissance festival started around 1963 in California). It may have even been a parody painting, making fun of the King’s gluttony.
One this is for sure … it apparently was not King Henry.
And although there’s alot of science theory lately about parallel dimensions, I somehow think it’s just that my memory is crap.
Here’s a fun graphic showing various product logos and names. How many of them are you wrong about?
I couldn’t figure out which of my existing sites would make sense for discussing the new HBO series, Westworld, so I decided to put it here. Because robots.
This article will contain updates of easter eggs and other references/links between the new HBO series and the 1973 original movie.
References to 1973 Westworld
There is a reference about how you could tell the original robots were fake by a handshake. In the 1973 movie, the hands were the giveaway.
Much more to come… I wanted to post something now to get it in the search engines.
2024-02-12 – Added image of Eggs, my first published program. Replaced Factory TNT screenshot with one that shows the proper graphics. Updated Meteor Clash screenshot.
…it was going to be Custom Programs Limited.
My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 back around 1981 or 1982 (whenever it first came out for “under $300” – $299.99 is what my father paid for it, I believe).
But my buddy, Jimmy*, suggested “Unlimited” because then it would be C.P.U. (I had not even heard the term CPU yet). And thus, CPU Software was born.
The letters appeared to the musical notes of 2001, one at a time, then the title screen would come up:
That was to be our startup for all our custom programs. It was going to be me writing for the VIC-20, and Jimmy writing for a Timex Sinclair ZX81, and another guy at school writing for a TRS-80 Model III (he didn’t own one, but had access to them at school). We thought we could custom write programs for people.
Our first program was a horse racing game, and it was written for each of these platforms, though I don’t seem to have a copy of it (or it’s on one of the tapes that is bad).
I don’t know why we didn’t pursue this, but I did write a bunch of small games for the VIC-20…
Eggs
I wrote a simple BASIC game called Eggs and it was published in the June/July 1983 issue of VIC-NIC News (issue #6).
It was a very simple “catch the falling object” game that used joystick.
Brick Layer
Bricklayer was a simple game based on the Atari VCS cartridge Surround. I apparently wasn’t date-aware back then, and the comments inside the program only list the title and author. Bummer. I really would like to know when I wrote these.
Bricklayer for the VIC-20
The game screen animated as it drew the black walls (with sounds), then the game began. Using a joystick (I think), you started “laying bricks” around the screen, trying to cover as much area as you could without running out of room or crashing.
If you got over 200, it would congratulate you. If you crashed, it would summarize your accomplishment.
Bricklayer for the VIC-20
Yeah. There was a time when this would have been considered a game. Interestingly enough, the movie TRON would come out a year later, taking the “draw lines” concept to a new level with the Light Cycles. The TRON arcade game featured Light Cycles as one of the four games it had, and this became my favorite arcade game of all-time.
I guess I had a thing for drawing lines.
Gold Grabber
Next up was a chase game.
You moved around the screen (you were the clubs symbol) trying to catch the gold (the diamond) while avoiding the bad guy (the +).
I have no idea what the “+” represented, and the game logic just had it wandering around randomly so I had to actually try to run in to it to see what it did.
Factory TNT
In my mind, this was called Factory TNT, but for some reason, the cassette was just labeled as TNT. This was a “Kaboom” catch the falling objects game. I had previously written a text version of the same type of game and called it Eggs. In it, you were catching falling eggs. This game was printed out in the VIC-NIC NEWS newsletter.
I almost had this program distributed by a company, but due to my very similar Eggs game being printed in a newsletter (which they also subscribed to), they decided to pass on it. (I belive this was the “FOX 20: the magazine for VIC 20 users” cassette-tape newsletter, published out of Pasadena/Deer Park, TX. (I lived in both those towns at one point, and recall going over to the house of the publisher – it was a home run operation – and meeting them once.)
The tape is bad, so the custom graphics are not loading, but it should look like a conveyor belt on the bottom, and pipes on the top. Classic round bombs would fall from the top and you moved your cup along the conveyor to catch them. If they hit the ground, they would turn in to a mushroom cloud. It has decent sound effects.
VIC-20 Factory TNT.
Apparently, it tracked high score (not saved to tape or anything, so it would reset any time you reloaded).
Factory TNT for the VIC-20
Factory TNT for the VIC-20
Apparently I had different rankings! Cool. I need to check the listing and see what all they were.
Thick Brush
For some reason, I did a blocky drawing program.
Thick Brush for the VIC-20
Thick Brush for the VIC-20
Thick Brush for the VIC-20
Thick Brush for the VIC-20
Thick Brush for the VIC-20
What in the world was this good for? There didn’t seem to be a way to save the “artwork” either. I guess I was, yet again, inspired by the Atari VCS Surround cartridge, which had a simple drawing mode (but the Atari version didn’t let you draw in colors – take that, Atari!).
Sky-Ape-Er
In a previous post, I mentioned my Donkey Kong inspired game, Sky-Ape-Er. Actually, it was really inspired by a VIC-20 game I bought that was inspired by Donkey Kong. I remember seeing it at the only VIC-20 store in Houston (I had my grandmother drive me across town to go to it), and they were out of stock, but they made a copy and sold it to me, and said I could get the real tape when they got more (I never did). On the label, they hand wrote “Krazy Kong”, so it might have been this one, or this Super Kong one. They appear to be the same game, but with different colors.
The important breakthrough was that they solved the problem of ladders and such by just making the level wrap around and go up. I had been working on a Donkey Kong style game and planned to use teleporters so you would stand on a spot and it a button and be teleported to the level above (I guess I had no idea how to make the climbing work then). When I saw the Krazy Kong approach, I knew I could do that, and make it better.
I worked on a few versions of this, with some graphics that looked like Donkey Kong girders, and some that looked like bricks. I think the brike
Unlike one I bought, my version had instructions!
I think mine looked better than the one I bought.
It turns out to be a very difficult game! I finally cleared the first screen and found out there were multiple levels! I wonder how many are in there??? This is level 2 (using the prototype graphics):
Sky-Ape-Er for the VIC-20
And the “continue” screen was kind of snarky. I seem to have put some work in to these things.
Sky-Ape-Er for the VIC-20
I don’t know what my intentions were with this game, but I expect I was trying to sell it as well. I had no idea that an individual could just make tapes and put ads in newsletters and sell copies back then. I wish I did — I probably could have made some money in those early days.
Maze Gobbler
I was annoyed with Pac-Man games not looking like Pac-Man (I’m looking’ at YOU, Atari VCS), so I started working on my own. I replicated the Pac-Man maze very accurately, but by the time I had done that, I was out of memory on this 3.5K computer. Nothing exists from that maze except a title screen, as far as I have found:
Maze Gobbler for the VIC-20
Meteor Clash
My attempt at a Defender-style game (maybe – I’m not sure that game even existed yet) was Meteor Clash. You moved a spaceship up and down and dodged endless meteors that headed to you.
Meters Clash for the VIC-20
This game had an intro that printed out text letter-by-letter like a typewriter, with beeping sounds! Fancy.
Meteor Clash for the VIC-20
Spell checkers did not exist for the VIC-20, apparently.
Meteor Clash for the VIC-20
I don’t know how to use those cursor control keys on the emulator yet, so I wasn’t able to play it. I was able to fly for a bit until a meteor hit me.
Oops. This screen shot was taken when the meteors were being redrawn, so it’s just the ship. It wasn’t much of a game yet, anyway. It did have sounds, and an explosion, though! Maybe that would have been enough to be a game, but I hadn’t even customized the graphics yet. (Maybe that’s “Meteor Storm” I keep remembering.)
Rover
I seem to recall that this was going to be a Moon Patrol style game, but all I can find is a test of the title screen.
Rover for the VIC-20
I found a few other things, too, including stuff written for the Super Expander cartridge which I cannot run on the emulator I am using. I need to figure out if that is possible in another emulator, since I have some games I wrote for it (enhanced graphics commands and such).
I also did a bunch of video titles for a booth at the Houston Boat Show for my father. I remember having an animated fish that swam back and forth on the screen in one of them, and drawing blue water waves. I later did graphics using my TRS-80 CoCo 1, and my dad was never impressed with it since the colors were so much worse than the VIC-20.
Interesting stuff, even if most of the tapes won’t load in 2016.
Man… I was, like, 12 years old when I was doing this. I really should have done more with it, but who knew computers were going to become such a part of life!
To be continued…
*Jimmy J was a kid I met in 7th grade. I had seen a listing in TV guide for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on PBS and had watched it. In English (?) class, I quoted a line from the show, and he turned around and said something like “you watched that to?” We became friends, and I think he’s the one that let me know about Douglas Adams and the book versions of Hitchhikers. He also introduced me to computers. He had a book on programming and we would go down to Radio Shack to type things in on the TRS-80 Model III. He’s likely the one that introduced me to BBSes too (again, we’d go down and get online at Radio Shack before we had our own computers and modems), and he was also the one that introduced me to the concept of hacking and phone phreaking. Fun times! Beyond my parents, I can’t think of any other person that had such an impact on the direction of my life at an early age. Thanks, James!
Over the years, there were a number of cool ideas at Sub-Etha Software that I really wish we’d followed through on. Last year, I mentioned some unfinished software projects I uncovered when going through all my old floppies, but there were also a few hardware projects that never made it out of the idea or concept stage…
Reveal VM100 “voice mail” device for PCs.
For instance, once I found a low-cost gadget at Walmart that interfaced a telephone line to a computer. It was controlled by a serial port, and plugged in to the audio in/out ports of a sound card on a PC. It came with software to turn the PC in to an answering machine.
I bought one to hook it up to my CoCo, and had plans to create a simple CoCo answering machine. On a 128K CoCo 3, it would be possible to play a short greeting, and record a short message from the caller then save it out to disk. Sure, the audio quality would have been poor and it would probably be cheaper to just buy an answering machine, but wouldn’t it be fun?
VM100 ready to hook to a CoCo via cassette cable and RS232 pak.
Concept software was witten (in assembly) to record audio from the VM100 (using 1-bit cassette input, or 6-bit joystick input) as well as play back digital audio.
I was even wanting to do touch tone decoding in software and create a simple voice mail system with mailboxes. There was even a plan to create a “telephone adventure game” where a description would be read and the user could make a choice by pressing buttons on their phone. (Years later, the Tellme company did something similar with a version of blackjack you could play over their 1-800-555-TELL demo line. It was so cool, Microsoft bought them!)
Woulda, coulda, shoulda…
I will try to share some more of these “lost” projects in the future, but today I wanted to focus on a virtual reality project I was working on.
VR was a big buzzword in the early 1990s, and many thought it was going to be the next big thing. As we know know, it fizzeled out rather quickly, with Atari, Sega and Nintendo abandoning their home VR products.
The Sega VR project has a CoCo connection, since one of the launch titles was being worked on by legendary CoCo game programmer Steve Bjork**! I believe this is the game that Bjork was working on: Iron Hammer
Nintendo’s effort eventually came out as the failed Virtual Boy where, instead of wearing an immersive helmet over your eyes, you peered in to a 3-D viewer that remained stationary on a table. Hey, at least they tried!
But I digress…
In the pre-world wide web days, we had things called catalogs which were like paper versions of Amazon.com. One of the catalogs I received always had interesting items often at cheap liquidation prices. One such item was the VictorMaxx Stuntmaster VR helmet. The wiki page claims this was the very first commercial VR helmet made available.
TODO: I need to add a photo of my VR helmet, as soon as I figure out which storage box it is in.
The Stuntmaster wasn’t a real VR helmet, though. It did not provide a stereoscopic display, and did not have any head tracking capability for use with true VR games. Instead, there was an analog dial on one side that connected to a shaft which you clipped to your shoulder. As you turned your head left or right, the shaft would turn the dial, allowing a simulation of left/right head tracking.
You could plug this helmet up to a Sega Genesis game console and then play some games where you held the game controller to play, but used your head to turn left and right. It seems unlikely that this would have worked well with any games not specifically designed for this, but hey, it was the first.
Here is a video of it in all it’s glory:
Virtuality’s Dactyl Nightmare (I am shown here playing it in Dallas in 1994) had a helmet and a hand grip controller that featured a trigger and a thumb button.
When I saw this in the catalog, I immediately ordered one to see if it could be used with the CoCo. My plan was to send CoCo video and audio to the helmet, then wire the left/right control shaft up as a joystick. Taking a nod from the controls of the Dactyl Nightmare arcade VR game I played, I was going to use the two joystick buttons for “walk” and “shoot”. My thought was you could turn your head left or right, then walk in that direction using the button. I guess I was thinking we’d build a special pistol grip controller to work with the helmet.
I had become friends with Vaughn Cato*, who did the original bouncing ball demo when the CoCo 3 first came out. He had been writing routines to do bitmap scaling and such, and I was hoping to use some of this in some CoCo game projects.
3-D maze engine by Vaughn Cato. It ran under OS-9.
On of the coolest things he created was a 3-D maze engine that drew everything using lines (I guess we would call this a vector engine). It looked similar to Dungeons of Daggorath but you could move through it in all directions, like Wolfenstein 3-D or DOOM did.
I cannot remember why, but for some reason the demo executable was called toast. It would read a small text file that represented the maze, then you could walk through the maze in 3-D. Things never went much further than the demo, but I thought it would work well with the VR helmet as the basis of some kind of VR maze game.
I think I was planning to create something like Phantom Slayer VR (a tribute to the old MED Systems 3-D maze game by Ken Kalish). I certainly know I had worked on this concept before without VR in mind, as well as a 3-D Pac-Man game. The Pac-Man one was interesting, as I got as far as recreating the original Pac-Man maze in 3-D and had it populated with dots you could walk over to “eat.”
Woulda, coulda, shoulda…
I still have the helmet. Who knows . . . maybe some day CoCo VR might still get done, even if there is no longer a supply for helmets to make it a sellable product.
*Vaughn Cato may be the only former CoCo guy to accept an Oscar. He was working with a company doing motion capture and he was on stage to receive a 2005 Technical Achievement Award. That’s quite the trip from a bouncing ball demo on a TRS-80, don’t you think?
**Steve Bjork has also had encounters with movies. If I recall correctly, he was an extra in films like Rollercoaster and The Goonies, as well as working on movie related video games like The Rocketeer and The Mask. Oh, and his CoCo program Audio Spectrum Analyzer appeared in Revenge of the Nerds, and his CoCo Zaxxon program appeared in Friday the 13th Part 4.
